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Comment by jakebsky | Hacker News Reader

The network is designed to be "locked open" in a way that prevents this. The architecture is designed to work like the web.

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Nothing against Bluesky, but I think we are all a little jaded after seeing decades of the "embrace, extend, extinguish" pattern.

This would be more "create, extinguish", because there's no existing AT protocol network to embrace.

"embrace" would be the rise of decentralized social media

If there can exist an "extinguish" step for the concept of decentralized social media itself then decentralized social media has already failed. The whole point is supposed to be about changing hearts and minds to embrace self-governance, a rug pull should just result in people moving somewhere else.

But that's sort of why Bluesky is not really decentralized, just federated. It's a pretty significant difference. Mastodon is federated and decentralized. Twitter is non-federated and centralized. Bluesky is trying to be the federated, centralized option.

Whether that works, we'll see. I for one just gave up social media about 8 years ago and, while feeling like I'm missing something flares up from time to time, it's nothing like the disaster my online life was before I gave it up. It wasn't a problem of missing federation or not being centralized. It was inherent to the way social media functions against my person.

How is BlueSky centralized? I could see that argument before this feature shipped, but "BlueSky is trying to be the federated, centralized option" goes counter to what the team has said directly.

I could maybe see an argument not based on technical premises, but instead something like "it will defacto become one because running a relay is too expensive" or such. Is that what you're going for?

I'm not who you replied to, but yes, that's my main concern: Bluesky is still a company building a thing to pay back the money it owes investors.

I worry that Bluesky becomes the de facto central actor and, due to having no stated business plan and a countdown to repay the money they took, pulls a Google, leveraging its dominance to introduce proprietary, breaking changes.

Yes, right now, the tech, team, interviews, etc sound mission-driven, but "revenue is the dominant term"[2] in the equation of a company's life, and there's still a very real chance that Bluesky dominates whatever federated AT Protocol network ends up forming, then uses that leverage to walk back all this promised openness.

I'm cautiously interested in Bluesky, but I'm watching for this kind of de facto dominance and we're probably too early on to see where the AT network is headed.

- [1] https://somehowmanage.com/2020/09/20/revenue-model-not-cultu...

Yes. In the sense that Mastodon is decentralized because there is no one Mastodon server. One may accumulate more users or be the "default" for the community of users, but there is no Mastodon server (much to the chagrin of many new users).

We don't even need the hypothetical "it will defacto become..." because Bluesky Social was, up till now, the ONLY way to participate in the community. They had 3 million users before federation, and now we can start to hook into what they've built, but the idea from the start was clearly not built around federation and decentralization, otherwise it would have been federated from day one, as Mastodon was. They can HOPE now, that people accept the federation concept, but there's enough gnashing of teeth around the pain of running Mastodon instance that it seems really clear that going from central to decentral is, if we're being intellectually honest, a bridge too far for most to cross.

Being jaded is understandable, but because this critique is generic, it is applicable to literally anything and everything. I don't see how you can ever get something that's considered good if you always assume it will turn into something bad regardless of its current stance.

Actually it's very hard, and becomes tiring after some point. I personally always keep a hope that I'll be wrong in the long run.

Sometimes I'm spot on, sometimes I stand corrected. The problem is, as time goes, your free time reserve starts to decline. You optimize things, consolidate services, etc., and these kind of migrations start to take tons of time.

Because of this, I gave "big web" up and moved to "small web", and always have plans to evacuate any service in a moment's notice.

It's like being a doomsday-preparer from a point, but at least I have backups and backup plans for everything.

Thats easy, you don't have a structure made with a single large actor capable of changing the rules of the game mid flight.

You get something good system by sharing power, not by once again falling for "trust us bro." You get it by understanding power imbalances and avoiding them the same way my dog avoids objects with large amounts of potential energy, because they're predictably dangerous.

I understand this, yet, when presented with exactly this, the response was "well what about EEE."

The protocol and hosting mechanisms are open source. There’s one actor currently sure, but it seems like bluesky is not holding onto that.

So presumably today's announcement that they are now supporting self-hosted instances is welcome news to you -- it is a huge stride in the direction you are advocating for.

How can it "lock open"? If 90+% of users are on the official bluesky servers, what could possibly technically prevent bluesky from just no longer federating with other hosts?

In the same way that Google stopped federating by no longer accepting connections from others, as long as most people keep their stuff at Bluesky they can also just close themselves off from others again. I don't necessarily think it is a big risk, but the only reason the web is resilient to this is that no single ISP controls enough of the network to take it "private".

Basically, until atproto is much bigger than bsky.app, the situation is not very different.

what binds this? I have no interest in joining if Jack can sell to Elon again and a switch gets flipped

That specific scenario is impossible, in my understanding, because Jack does not have an ownership stake in the company.

This release, of federation, is in my mind a major answer to the real question you're asking, which is the same but with "the employees" instead of "Jack," as they have the equity stake.

Once things are federated, other folks gain power over the protocol, by virtue of usage. If Bluesky PBLLC starts to do shady things, the other instances can refuse to do so, and talk to each other instead.

This is why the split between AT and BlueSky is important, and why this news matters, as it is meaningfully delivering on the desire to protect against such a thing.

Right I didn't mean to get into the business aspect, but essentially "what prevents someone from undoing this for money." Thanks for the detail.

It's all good. The Jack thing is, in my mind, a bit sensitive, because a lot of people criticizing BlueSky talk as though Jack runs the place, owns it, etc, all of which seems factually incorrect. He has a board seat, but seemingly cares about it so little that he deleted his account. From what I hear, nostr is his focus, but I'm not on there so I can't speak to that personally.

Jack has certainly been successful in building a general perception that bsky is "the Twitter founder's" next social network project, intentionally or otherwise

The issue here is that if 99% of people use BlueSky and 1% use non-BlueSky AtProto servers, that leaves BlueSky with all the power to turn off federation. If BlueSky starts to do shady things, other instances can refuse and talk to each other instead - and eliminate 99% of your followers, 99% of the people you're following, etc.

Email is open, but if GMail decides to block all email from you, you're toast. And while GMail is large, their percentage of email inboxes pales in comparison to BlueSky's percentage of AtProto users (which is near 100% at the moment).

Yes, once things are federated, other folks start gaining some power over the protocol by virtue of usage. However, if 99% of people remain with BlueSky, everyone else essentially has no power.

mastodon.social has around 15% of the Fediverse on its server and it means that it has a lot of power. Mastodon (the software) is around 72% of the Fediverse which means that other ActivityPub software essentially has to use Mastodon-flavored ActivityPub with whatever quirks might exist in Mastodon. But that's still way less power than BlueSky has in the AtProto ecosystem.

Open protocols are only good as long as there's enough reason for lots of different parties to keep those lines of communication open. mastodon.social needs to keep supporting ActivityPub because they'd lose 85% of their network if they stopped. Let's say it's 2030 and AtProto has 500M users and 99% of them are using BlueSky. BlueSky could simply turn off all the AtProto endpoints and make their web and mobile apps use proprietary endpoints. I'm not saying they'd do that, but they certainly could. Now, if 2030 comes around and there are 500M AtProto users and 10% of them are on BlueSky, then it wouldn't really be possible for BlueSky to turn off AtProto. They'd lose 90% of their network.

But we don't know if AtProto will catch on outside of BlueSky or if BlueSky will remain the vast majority of the network. If there isn't a lot of use outside of BlueSky, there could come a day when it's very tempting to turn it off - or do something that isn't quite turning it off, but would effectively accomplish it. Maybe they just start making breaking changes to AtProto, rolling it out, and documenting the change a week later and third parties just end up unreliable and people migrate off them. There's lots of options.

Five years from now, how is BlueSky making money? Are they just storing, processing, and serving lots of content without good monetization as third party apps start grabbing users and making money off their servers? I mean, we saw what Reddit and Twitter did. If BlueSky controls 99% of AtProto users, they can turn the firehose off. Even if they aren't trying to be evil or maximize their revenue, at some point they need money for all those engineers and servers. Maybe the official BlueSky app will be popular enough for them to get some ad revenue there and not feel the need to go after third party apps. Maybe a lot of things.

But until BlueSky is a minority of AtProto users/posts/etc., it's still something they have a lot of power over - including the power to pivot BlueSky off AtProto and make BlueSky a proprietary network.

For sure. One nice thing about AT's design is that, if they do, you can take your posts over to some other host, and it'll all Just Work. True account portability makes that kind of power grab harder. Of course, that would require users to actually move, which is not a given.

Time will tell!

> A central directory server collects and validates operations, and maintains a transparent log of operations for each DID.

(https://github.com/did-method-plc/did-method-plc/blob/main/R... linked from https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation)

You are not in control of what you see in your feed, it's the algorithm that chooses for you. So while technically all kinds of content can exist, most users will only see what's officially approved.

BlueSky literally allows for users to create their own feeds with whatever algorithms they want, and to share them with others. You can follow them as easily as you can follow an account. I'm already following several.

So is Signal, and yet here we are

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